VIDEO OF THE DAY: Military attorneys drop bad news for Pete Hegseth
A group of top former US military lawyers, many of whom were fired by Hegseth himself, issued a statement declaring that Pete Hegseth and everyone down the chain of command committed murder and/or war crimes when they decided to butcher two helpless sailors clinging to their burning ship, and they even called on our servicemembers to disobey such orders in the future. No wonder Hegseth was freaking out so much about the call to disobey illegal orders — he knew he'd already issued one and is in serious legal jeopardy once anyone inclined to prosecuter him gets into power.
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Make Thanksgiving radical again
Kali Holloway, The Nation: "It’s a good thing conservatives know nothing about the actual history of this country they claim to love so much—otherwise, they’d probably launch a War on Thanksgiving. That’s because, if you study the path that Thanksgiving took on the way to its current culturally dominant presence in the calendar, it becomes clear that it’s low-key one of America’s wokest holidays. Far from being an eternal symbol of Pilgrims-and-Indians lies, Thanksgiving was, for a good portion of its history, a symbol of social reform and Northern abolitionism—a day the white slaveholding South held in disdain and refused, for decades, to celebrate. The myth of Thanksgiving isn’t just in sanitized denials of white settler-colonial violence and Indigenous genocide. It’s also in the fiction that the holiday itself has only recently become “politicized,” when it was never apolitical to begin with. Historian Joshua Zeitz notes that 'by the late 1840s, some form of harvest thanksgiving celebration was observed in 21 states,' but the dates of each observance differed based on each governor’s choosing. Southern states were among those celebrating, but as anti-slavery sentiment grew more fervent and pervasive in the North, Thanksgiving took on new sectional meanings. On January 1, 1808, Black abolitionist and Episcopal priest Absalom Jones preached 'A Thanksgiving Sermon,' recognizing the first day of the federal ban on transatlantic trafficking of Africans into America to be enslaved. The Rev. Jones suggested that January 1 should be annually observed as a 'day of publick thanksgiving' to 'remember the history of the sufferings of our brethren' and to commemorate the end of 'the trade which dragged your fathers from their native country, and sold them as bondmen in the United States of America.' In his Nov. 26, 1835, Thanksgiving sermon, New Hampshire’s Rev. Calvin Cutler called slavery 'a standing memorial of our shame and hypocrisy,' labeling the institution a betrayal of the country’s professed ideals and a threat to freedom of all. And there is Boston-based Unitarian minister Theodore Parker’s November 28, 1850, sermon for Thanksgiving, delivered just two months after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which ordered that Black folks who had escaped bondage be captured and returned to their so-called masters, even if they were in free states. “I think I know of one cause which may dissolve the Union—one which ought to dissolve it, if put in action,” Parker announced. “That is, a serious attempt to execute the Fugitive Slave Law, here and in all the North. I mean an attempt to recover and take back all the fugitive slaves in the North, and to punish, with fine and imprisonment, all who aid or conceal them. The South has browbeat us again and again.… She has imprisoned our citizens; driven off, with scorn and loathing, our officers sent to ask constitutional justice. She has spit upon us. Let her come to take back the fugitives—and, trust me, she will wake up the lion.' A few years ago, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton—who calls slavery a 'necessary evil' and more than once has advocated murdering protesters—complained that Thanksgiving was being undermined by 'revisionist charlatans of the radical left.' Cotton, like the rest of the right-wing chorus singing this tune, was actually confessing his deep, seemingly infinite ignorance. The real revisionism of Thanksgiving’s history isn’t in acknowledging the truth of colonial violence but in whitewashing the abolitionist politics that once defined the day. The most historically faithful way to recognize that history, too long ignored, is by highlighting those radical roots.
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Freshman Democrat under ATTACK for standing up to the GOP
Nellie Pou for Congress: Nellie Pou has only been in Congress a few months, but she’s already facing a barrage of GOP attacks for voting against their destructive budget bill that would hand out huge tax breaks to the wealthy while RAISING taxes on working families. Just a few days ago, the NRCC issued an error-filled press release written by Big Business lobbyists that falsely smeared her with lies. She’s one of the few Democrats to win her seat in a county that voted for Trump; she’s going to need all the help she can get if we want to protect the MUST-HOLD seat and retake Congress. Will you chip in to thank her for doing the right thing and helping her weather the storm against GOP attacks?
Pandemic programs worked, so business elites killed them off
Fran Quigley, Jacobin: "There is an enduring perception that the United States is an individualistic nation whose people oppose collective guarantees to the basic necessities of life. This perception is false. Look at, for example, the overwhelming popularity of our Social Security program and the guarantees of free public education contained in every state constitution; the United States already has some well-established economic rights that are deeply woven into the fabric of our society. Public opinion polls in recent years show strong majorities in support of recognizing and enforcing housing and health care as human rights and calling for the government to do more to address food insecurity. Most Americans have long supported a government jobs guarantee. So what is stopping us? Corporations and wealthy individuals who deploy their de facto unlimited ability to fund campaigns and lobby lawmakers to crush economic support programs. Part of their motivation is to preserve and expand the benefits of some of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world. But the wealthy’s main goal in opposing economic support programs is something else altogether. During 2020, more jobs were lost than at any time in the eighty-plus years of recorded US history — and more than the next two highest job-loss years combined. The US system connects health care to employment, so those job losses were accompanied by cancellation of health care and a rise in hunger. Waves of evictions and foreclosures were looming. Yet by 2021, not only was disaster averted, but the percentage of US people and children living in poverty actually dropped to the lowest in recorded history. Evictions plummeted. Millions fewer children were going hungry than before the pandemic. This was no miracle. It was the US government unleashing the power it always had — and still has today — to ensure that basic needs are met, and that no one in this country be homeless, go hungry, or endure without the health care they need. Who could possibly not cheer for results like this? Well, for one, billionaires who require people to be struggling enough that they are willing to be Domino’s Pizza delivery drivers. Suddenly, in 2021, people were not hungry enough. So the collective political mouthpiece of these corporations, the US Chamber of Commerce, began to openly lobby Congress and the White House to end the enhanced unemployment benefits. The landlord lobbyists at the National Apartment Association ramped up their own push against the eviction moratorium, including multiple lawsuits challenging its legality. Fast-food franchise owners, restaurant executives, and the National Restaurant Association members cashed in their millions of dollars in contributions to governors of states, urging them to refuse to distribute the enhanced federal unemployment benefits. Today, the combined political power of these corporations and landlords is without peer. The National Association of Realtors is the nation’s top spender on lobbying, and the Chamber of Commerce is number two. During the first three months of the national eviction moratorium, the National Association of Realtors dumped $33 million into a frantic surge of lobbying. The money talked. Over half of state governors withdrew from the federal unemployment support programs even before they were set to expire in September 2021. In May 2021, more than a dozen US Senators and Representatives introduced the unsubtly named 'Get America Back to Work Act.' They made no effort to conceal in whose interests they were acting.
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War in Venezuela, brought to you by the same people who lied us into Iraq
Alain Stephens, The Intercept: The United States is amassing power off Venezuela’s coast. Warships, Marine detachments, and surveillance aircraft are flowing into the Caribbean under the banner of “counter-narcotics operations.” Military officials have presented Donald Trump with various game plans for potential operations. The U.S. president is openly tying Nicolás Maduro to narco-terror networks and cartel structures, while dangling both “talks” and threatening the use of military force in the same breath. It’s all pushing toward the culmination of crowning Maduro and his government America’s next top 'terrorists' — the magic movie-script label that means the bombs can start heating up. Then comes the media warm-up act: a New York Times op-ed by Bret Stephens, published on Monday, assuring readers in 'The Case for Overthrowing Maduro' that this is all modest, calibrated, even reasonable. 'The serious question is whether American intervention would make things even worse,' Stephens writes. 'Intervention means war, and war means death. … The law of unintended consequences is unrepealable.' The column’s argument is simple: Relax. This isn’t Iraq, a conflict Stephens helped cheerlead our way into and proudly declared in 2023 that two decades later, he doesn’t regret supporting the war. 'There are also important differences between Venezuela and Iraq or Libya,' he continues. 'They include Trump’s clear reluctance to put U.S. boots on the ground for any extended period. And they include the fact that we can learn from our past mistakes.' Venezuela, Stephens argues, provides grounds for intervention against criminals in a failing state. Maduro is corrupt, the threat is real, and Trump’s moves are not the opening shots of a war but the necessary application of restrained power. It’s an argument Americans have heard before. And it’s as familiar as the hardware now cruising toward Caracas. The echoes of Iraq are everywhere: the moral certainty, the insistence on a narrow mission, laws stretched to accommodate force, the journalist class nudging readers toward the idea of escalation. The Times leans on that posture — the intellectual confidence that if a dictator is cruel enough, if his country is chaotic enough, then U.S. firepower is not only justified but prudent and even moral. Iraq should have been the end of innocence in American foreign-policy thinking. We toppled Saddam Hussein; what followed was not liberation but vacuum. Power didn’t flow to democratic institutions — it scattered, producing insurgency, sectarian collapse, and a national debt Americans will never pay off. Even in articles and political rhetoric selling the safe insistence this isn’t anything like Iraq, it’s hitting the familiar beats: Redefine the battlefield as a courtroom, call the targets 'terrorists,' and pretend the spectators won’t notice. It’s the old Washington parlor trick — war recast as paperwork, missiles disguised as 'measured responses.' But beneath the soothing language is the real hazard: This posture locks the United States into a glide path toward escalation. It casts Maduro as a stationary object America can strike without consequence, right up until he isn’t. Because the moment a U.S. service member dies in some hillside village most Americans couldn’t find on a map last week, or a destroyer gets hit by something unseen in the dark, the mission will shed every polite euphemism. It won’t be 'limited.' It won’t be 'precision interdictions.' It will become the only war frame Washington and the political media never hesitates to embrace: American vengeance, expansive and unbounded.
The poverty line is a lie; America is much, much poorer than we think
Michael W. Green, Yes, I Give A Fig: "I have spent my career distrusting the obvious. But there was one number I had somehow never interrogated. The poverty line. I don’t know why. It seemed apolitical, an actuarial fact calculated by serious people in government offices. A line someone else drew decades ago that we use to define who is 'poor,' who is 'middle class,';and who deserves help. This week, while trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment, I came across a sentence buried in a research paper: 'The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.' I read it again. Three times the minimum food budget. I felt sick. The formula was developed by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration. In 1963, she observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries. Since pricing data was hard to come by for many items, e.g. housing, if you could calculate a minimum adequate food budget at the grocery store, you could multiply by three and establish a poverty line. For 1963, that floor made sense. Housing was relatively cheap. A family could rent a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income, as we’ve discussed. Healthcare was provided by employers and cost relatively little (Blue Cross coverage averaged $10/month). Childcare didn’t really exist as a market—mothers stayed home, family helped, or neighbors (who likely had someone home) watched each other’s kids. Cars were affordable, if prone to breakdowns. Retirement meant a pension income, not a pile of 401(k) assets you had to fund yourself. But everything changed between 1963 and 2024. Housing costs exploded. Healthcare became the largest household expense for many families. Employer coverage shrank while deductibles grew. Childcare became a market, and that market became ruinously expensive. College went from affordable to crippling. Transportation costs rose as cities sprawled and public transit withered under government neglect. The labor model shifted. A second income became mandatory to maintain the standard of living that one income formerly provided. But a second income meant childcare became mandatory, which meant two cars became mandatory. Or maybe you’d simply be “asking for a lot generationally speaking” because living near your parents helps to defray those childcare costs. The composition of household spending transformed completely. In 2024, food-at-home is no longer 33% of household spending. For most families, it’s 5 to 7 percent. Housing now consumes 35 to 45 percent. Healthcare takes 15 to 25 percent. Childcare, for families with young children, can eat 20 to 40 percent. If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
It becomes sixteen.
Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200. It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000. And remember: Orshansky was only trying to define too little.' She was identifying crisis, not sufficiency. If the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function—is honestly updated to current spending patterns, it lands at $140,000. What does that tell you about the $31,200 line we still use? It tells you we are measuring starvation."
Food for thought
The Sunday wrap-up
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